by Julie Paul
“Will do,” I called. “Good luck with the buckwheat.”
Back at the cottage, I went to check if The Emp was still alive. Not choking on his own spew, able to breathe. Good enough. I lay down on the couch to try to fight off a headache that was beginning to build.
Alcohol was an addiction, and addicts needed empathy. And I felt it—for people I didn’t know, at least. I knew that people were hurting everywhere, and needed to soothe their brokenness with whatever they could get. The thing was, my father was not suffering. He had a wife who dedicated her life to creating a magazine-worthy home—albeit, for me, a claustrophobic one—two kids who hadn’t fucked up in any substantial way, a job with enough money to let him keep the cottage, and seemingly rock-solid health despite his dirty habit. He had a good life. It should have added up to something better than his regular obliteration.
Donna had turned into Mom, pretending the man didn’t have a problem, and I didn’t blame her: she was a lot closer to our parents, and now with a boy who needed grandparents, I could see why she’d rather live as if things were rosy. Sammy and my father loved each other. Yesterday The Emp must’ve played ten rounds of Go Fish! and even read Sammy a story. Despite deliberately leaving all this behind, I envied Donna her full life.
As for me, when I wasn’t working, or had no new boyfriend in the bed, my days were empty vessels; I’d begun to think that getting tattoos was intimate—the buzz, the pain, the blood, the scarring—and at least I was left with something I wanted to see again. I was only twenty-seven, but I was lonely. I was starting to think I would become one of those women on the streetcar who tell strangers about their breakfast, just to talk.
I didn’t think of Sammy often before the day in the mall. But when he was with me in the canoe, I felt something completely new: he was mine. Not that I owned him. I guess you could call it kinship. He was my nephew; I was his auntie. Maybe that relationship could mean more than just buying him presents.
After a few minutes, Sammy came into the cottage and stood on the mat, soaking wet and shivering, still in his life jacket.
“What’s up, matey?”
“The frog swam away, and we lost the blue noodle.” He began to whimper.
I got up to help. “You don’t want to take that thing off?” He stepped into the antique Care Bears towel I was holding open. He smelled like coconut SPF 100 and fish skin.
“I’m going back down,” he said.
I rubbed his little arms to warm him up.
“That was my favourite noodle!” He grumbled some more.
“Oh, well, it’s just gone down the lake a bit. We’ll get it later. You and me in the pea-green pod, okay?” It sounded more like naptime than canoe time. Did kids still nap?
“Mommy’s doing that already.”
I looked out the window over the sink to the lake below. Donna had managed to get the canoe into the water and up alongside the dock. I lifted Sammy up onto the counter. “Let’s watch her!”
He was still shaking, his taut muscles vibrating against my shoulder like a washing machine.
“She wouldn’t let me go,” he whined. “I wanted to go along!”
“She’ll be right back,” I told him. How could I teach him to take that whine out of his voice?
Sammy sat on the counter, his feet in the kitchen sink, and we both observed Donna from above. We were watching closely when she stepped into the wrong side of the boat and fell into the lake.
Donna has cerebral palsy, just a mild case that affects one side of her body. The cord was wrapped around her neck at birth and deprived her brain of oxygen for minutes. After multiple surgeries on her left arm and leg, she’s been left with one smaller hand and one smaller foot—lucky, in comparison to most others with CP. She holds her arm like it’s a wounded paw and takes shorter steps so the foot doesn’t drag her down, but otherwise, she’s totally okay.
Naturally, she’s had to make concessions, and so has her family. There were times during our childhood when I felt like one of those rats that turned to horses in Cinderella, pulling her royal carriage—the little red wagon did get up to a decent speed with a dose of younger-sibling anger as fuel.
“Trish! Trish!” Donna started calling to us before she could see we were on the way down to help her. “Throw me a bloody life preserver!” More with the panic, British-style.
She was flapping around, perfectly fine, but stressing herself out working to get the canoe turned upright. A boa of weeds ringed her neck. I threw her the life jacket to complete the ensemble.
“The blasted paddles!” Donna yelled. “They’re floating away!” She held on to the life jacket and started kicking her way toward them.
At this point, our mother arrived home. I caught a glimpse of a pearly silver car pulling out of the driveway as she floated down the steps in her post-spa bliss, wearing a shapeless sage green tunic.
“Donna’s swimming, is she?” Mom asked in a smiley voice. “Hello, dear Sammy. Hello, Patricia.”
“Not swimming, Grandma,” Sammy said. “She was chasing the noodles and then she tipped out of the canoe and now the paddles are gone, too.”
Mom looked at me for confirmation, the worry back on her face.
I nodded. “Business as usual.”
“Where’s your father?”
“Napping.”
She sighed. Spa time was over. “Sammy, will you come with me in the pedal boat, once you find your sun hat? We are going on a rescue mission.”
Sammy cheered. “Another adventure!”
Donna had given up and was climbing the ladder at the end of the dock, red-faced and panting, picking weeds out of her bathing suit. The green canoe was face down in the lake.
“Hello, dear,” Mom said. “Are you all right?”
And although my sister was clearly not all right, judging by her rate of breathing and the pissy expression she wore, she followed our code of conduct: never alarm our mother, never make sudden gestures, or talk about adventures we’ve had, never admit to bodily harm. Donna simply nodded.
The Emp wasn’t a bad guy. He didn’t hit us, didn’t wake us up in the middle of the night to beat us, like my friend’s mother had, calling them little shits and worse, as if they were being bad while they slept. He never touched me down there, never mortally wounded anyone. But still, it was hard for me. I had to learn to lie, for him and for me. I never took rides with him after 3:00 PM, never volunteered my daddy for pickup after dances or shows. I took to pouring out his bottles, filling them with coloured water, throwing tantrums about it, leaving Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlets out for him to stumble over, the whole nine yards. I pleaded with my mother to help, but she wouldn’t entertain the idea that anything was dire enough to seek help. Wouldn’t want word getting out, now, would we?
After Sammy and my mother were tucked into the pedal boat and pushing toward the runaway paddles and noodles, Donna and I waded into the lake and worked together to get the canoe turned over, then into shore.
“Doesn’t this remind you of that day we tipped with The Emp?” I asked her when we were resting on plastic chairs on the beach beside Sammy’s sandcastle.
She shook her head. “I don’t really remember it.”
“Really? The day he cried?”
Donna avoided my gaze and started rattling on about the high water level and the petition going around about banning gas motors on the lake.
I pressed on. “You really don’t remember?”
She stood up. “No, I don’t. Now will you please help me take these chairs away from the edge of the lake in case those clouds mean business?”
Bulbous clouds were gathering at the far end of the lake, but it was still sunny and clear at our place. I dropped the memory talk and helped her, and then said I was going back up to check on The Emp. I really just wanted to take a Tylenol and lie down again for a few minutes.
“I’ll come, too,” she said. “Should we try to get him up? Wash his face, change his shirt, you know, while Mom i
s out?”
“Not a chance,” I said. We climbed the stairs, me letting her go first, as always. “He’s a big boy, Donna. It’s not up to us any more.”
I tried to imagine the future. Who would take care of him if Mom were to go before he did? Not me. I could not see myself swabbing his bony, pseudo-aristocratic ass with a Wet One. No. Not my department.
He was lying on his back like a coffined body, hands on his belly, cheeks flushed, that familiar, sweetly-acrid scent escaping his pores.
“At least we should open the window,” Donna said. “It smells in here.”
She crawled onto the bed and reached over The Emp to the window: the cottage was built when people were shrunken versions of what they are now, when a vacation house’s bedroom was a cubbyhole and people built according to how much cold, hard cash they had in hand. All the windows were old storm windows from an even older house, hinged on their top edge and held open by hooks suspended from the rafters of the unfinished ceiling.
When there was air flow, we closed his door and began cleaning up the kitchen.
“Oh, hey, maybe you know,” I said as I swept the floor. “George mentioned something that happened to a boy named Patrick?”
Donna stopped wiping the table for a second.
“Did you know him?”
She turned to the stove and attacked its surface. “You’ll have to ask Mom.”
I heard Mom and Sammy stomping up the stairs. Donna dropped her rag and raced out to meet them. I kept sweeping. There was enough sand on that floor to build a castle.
My mother came into the kitchen, her sage green tunic soaked up to her hips. “Well,” she said. “We found everything down by the Murphy place.” She was speaking slowly, melodically, the way she used to talk when she wanted to distract us from something. Like steering us away from an accident on the road, saying, “Let’s all go over here for ice cream, shall we?”
“Nearly time for dinner! I brought some lovely tomatoes and basil home from the market near the spa, and I thought we could start with a bruschetta. Or, Patricia, would you rather make one of your famous Greek salads?”
Wow, she was really going back in time; I hadn’t made a Greek salad in years. “Mom,” I said. “Who’s Patrick?”
“Who? Oh.” She cleared her throat. She pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down. “Well.”
She sat staring out at the lake. I could hear Donna and Sammy on the deck, discussing the reasons why he couldn’t stuff three cookies into his mouth at the same time.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
“Yes, Trish. I’m okay.” Her voice was barely audible. “But I think—yes, you’d better come out on the deck, before your father wakes up.”
I stuck the broom back in the closet and found Mom and Donna outside on the deck, having a mumbled conversation that stopped when I arrived. They were sitting at the oval plastic table with their hands folded in front of them. They looked as if they’d seen a ghost; their faces were pale and they wouldn’t look at me directly.
“Sit down,” they said in unison. A team approach. I sat down in the same chair The Emp had passed out in.
“Where’s Sammy?” I suddenly wanted him with me; I needed a comrade.
“Castle town,” Donna pointed toward the beach.
He was struggling to manoeuvre his sand pails, wearing that stupid life jacket. She probably made him wear it on rainy days.
“So,” Mom said. “George was here.” She was smiling, but it was more of her fake niceness.
“So who’s Patrick?”
My mother looked at her lap.
“Donna, will you please tell me who Patrick is?”
There was a long pause. “Well,” Donna said. “He was . . .” She looked at Mom.
“He was a darling boy,” Mom finished quietly. “You would have loved him.”
I was confused. “Yeah, but who was he?”
She wouldn’t look at me. “He was my little boy.”
“Wait a second.” Something about the way she and Donna kept darting looks at each other was making me sweat. “Are you saying that he—that you have another child?” I looked to Donna for help. “We have a brother?”
She nodded. “Neither of us knew him.”
My right eyelid began to twitch. A brother? I had a brother? The questions tumbled out. “What do you mean, knew him? Where is he? What happened?”
“He was playing in the water,” Mom said. “I was in the hospital, with a newborn Donna, and your father was at home with him.”
Donna leaned over and down to get a better view of Sammy, even though we could hear him singing.
“What, you mean he’s—he’s dead?”
“He died that day,” Donna said. “Five years old. Sammy’s age.”
“Oh, my God.” I’d had a brother, and lost him. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Then I got it: The Emp. It felt as though chainmail had dropped over my shoulders. “He was drunk, wasn’t he?”
“No,” Mom said. “No, he wasn’t.” She spoke too loudly. “It was an accident.”
“As if,” I said.
My mother was adamant. “Your father didn’t drink back then. I mean, he had a beer or two in the afternoons, but he wasn’t—he didn’t drink, like now.” She closed her eyes for a moment, as if to summon her stronger self. “We didn’t want either of you to carry this around. A dead brother can haunt you forever. God knows I know that, with my brother taken by that car crash. And I didn’t want you to be afraid of water. So, we just pretended there had been . . . no Patrick. We focused on raising you two instead, in the best way we could.”
“Incredible.” To think I’d had a brother.
“Bob loved him so much,” Mom went on. She rose slowly and walked over to where she’d left her purse on the railing, pulled out her wallet, and took a photo from within its folds. “Look, this is the two of them, together, just a few months before—before he was taken from us.”
I looked closely at the photo. A young Emp was holding a small blond kid on his knee like he was playing Santa. A boy with the same eye shape as him. Patrick. They were smiling, as if someone were making a puppet dance behind the camera. Happy. Living a good life. Alive, a hundred percent.
Patrick looked a bit like Donna had when she was young, but even more like Sammy, singing Sammy, down at the edge of the lake.
“I can’t believe this,” I said. “Why would you keep this from me?”
“Trish, they did the best they could.” Donna had her arms folded, her small hand tucked behind the good one.
My sister had known. Everyone had known. “When did you find out?”
Donna looked away. “Just after I had Sammy, Dad kind of—well, he had a sort of a breakdown. Mom had to tell me why.”
“I see. And you just wanted to keep me completely in the dark.” Now I was pacing the deck. “What, like forever?”
“Can you imagine how hard it must have been? Coming home with a newborn, and losing a son? Give Mom a break, will you?”
“I’m sorry, Mom. It must be a horrible thing to lose a child.”
She sat back in her chair and looked at me, surprised, I think, by my generosity.
“But it’s just too unfuckingbelievable that you told Donna and not me.”
“Trish!” Donna said. “Keep your voice down.” She leaned to see Sammy again.
“Did the police come? Was there an investigation?”
Mom shook her head. “There was nothing to investigate. A little boy drowned in a lake, Trish. A tragedy. No one to blame.”
“Except Beefeater. Or was it Jack Daniels? What was it then, Mom?”
My mother just stared at the photo.
I stared into the white cedars all around us, keeping us hidden from the world. They were full of cedar seeds, tight lime-green buds that The Emp used to pelt us with when he’d had a few, stinging our bare arms and legs despite our pleas for him to stop. He’d laughed; he’d wanted to make us hurt.
Sammy was belting out “Fr�
�re Jacques” below, really letting the lake have it. Donna wouldn’t look at me. But she couldn’t, really, could she? She was always head-cranked toward the beach, making sure the orange of Sammy’s life jacket was still in view.
My mother’s lips were trembling. “Trish. Your father was not a drinker back then. He wasn’t. He was a sweet man who wanted a simple, sweet life, and then his only son died.”
“His only son,” I repeated. “It ruined him, is what you’re saying.”
She nodded, teary-eyed. “I thought having other children would help him.”
“Yeah, well, that turned out nicely, didn’t it? The love’s just poured out of him ever since.”
“See, I knew we shouldn’t have told her,” Donna said to Mom. “She’s too damned selfish to even get it!” Then she turned to me. “Do you know that they were worried every second we were here at the lake, but they didn’t want us to miss out on all this?”
Mom put up her hand to stop Donna. “It’s okay. Trish has a right to be angry. She’s always felt like she’s had the short end of the stick, no matter how hard I tried.” Her voice broke. “I tried to make your life the best it could be, but I failed. You’ve just abandoned us, living your perfect life in Toronto, and I don’t know where I went wrong.”
“Really, you don’t know? You lied to me my whole life. How’s that for starters?”
“You’re such a little bitch!” Donna yelled. “You don’t deserve any of what she’s done for you. Always the baby, always special little Trish, the weird but talented one doing her own thing in the big city, too busy to care about her family. Why should she have told you about Patrick? Would it have made any difference to you and your holier-than-everyone attitude? No. It would just make you hate Dad even more.”
Mom put her hands over her ears and began to rock a little, eyes shut tight. Donna wasn’t finished.
“In fact, why are you even here now? We’re all beneath you, isn’t that what you’ve always thought? That we aren’t good enough to be your family?”
